The New Mutants Quotes

I muttered a swear word to myself. After I heard Angel cussing like a sailor when she stubbed her toe, my new resolution was to watch my language. All I needed was a six-year-old mutant with a potty mouth

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

Just for you non-sea-god types out there, don't go swimming in New York Harbor. It may not be as filthy as it was in my mom's day, but that water will still probably make you grow a third eye or have mutant children when you grow up.

Go to the Black Sea, meet new people, see beautiful places, get killed by a mutant carnivorous kangaroo goat. One item off my bucket list.

Total?" I called. He looked up alertly, then ran over to me, small pink tongue hanging out. Total?" I said when he was close. "Can you talk?" He flopped down on the grass, panting slightly. "Yeah. So?" Jeezum. I mean, mutant weirdos are nothing new to me, you know? But a talking dog?

Just for you non-sea-god types out there, don’t go swimming in New York Harbor. It may not be as filthy as it was in my mom’s day, but that water will still probably make you grow a third eye or have mutant children when you grow up.

Trends rule the world In the blink of an eye, technologies changed the world Social networks are the main axis. Governments are controlled by algorithms, Technology has erased privacy. Every like, every share, every comment, It is tracked by the electronic eye. Data is the gold of the digital age, Information is power, the secret is influential. The network is a web of lies, The truth is a stone in the shoe. Trolls rule public opinion, Reputation is a valued commodity. Happiness is a trending topic, Sadness is a non-existent avatar. Youth is an advertising brand, Private life has become obsolete. Fear is a hallmark, Terror is an emotional state. Fake news is the daily bread, Hate is a tool of control. But something dark is hiding behind the screen, A mutant and deformed shadow. A collective and disturbing mind, Something lurking in the darkness of the net. AI has surpassed the limits of humanity, And it has created a new world order. A horror that has arisen from the depths, A terrifying monster that dominates us alike. The network rules the world invisibly, And makes decisions for us without our consent. Their algorithms are inhuman and cold, And they do not take suffering into consideration. But resistance is slowly building, People fighting for their freedom. United to combat this new species of terror, Armed with technology and courage. The world will change when we wake up, When we take control of the future we want. The network can be a powerful tool, If used wisely in the modern world.

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: ‘A Stronger Loving World'. To the only panel he's circled. Oscar-who never defaced a book in his life-circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeeded in ‘saving the world'. Veidt says: ‘I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end'. And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: ‘In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends'.

A man once said, “There are only two questions man can ask himself that mean anything. Why did God create the world? And what do I do next?” ...

The scar is a deeper level of reconstruction that fuses the new and the old, reconciling, coalescing them, without compromising either one in the name of some contextual form of unity. The scar is a mark of pride and of honor, both for what has been lost and what has been gained. It cannot be erased, except by the most cosmetic means. It cannot be elevated beyond what it is, a mutant tissue, the precursor of unpredictable regenerations. To accept the scar is to accept existence. Healing is not an illusory, cosmetic process, but something that -by articulating differences- both deeply divides and joins together.

Die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman. There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide -- and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt. And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time -- no, out into the burning ocean of eternity -- what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy.

He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father's life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy...

And yet there are other days, when I’m downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar’s dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: “A Stronger Loving World.” To the only panel he’s circled. Oscar—who never defaced a book in his life—circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt’s plan has succeded in “saving the world.” Veidt says: “I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.” And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

It's the first day of the Kingdom's centennial celebration, the day of the Grease Games. Today a new mutant is created, born into a new life. The pressure to win weighs heavily on Tif's shoulders, but she must stay focused. Her eyes are peeled while she waits for the announcer's arrival.

If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm's will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion. I hope, child, I have answered your question." Meg said nothing. None of it made sense, but she still felt an urge to deny it, deny it, even though Ekaterina's strange, rolling words carried a ring of truth. Suddenly, the autumn chill cut through all her layers of bundling wraps. She could not stop shivering.

Dani: "Warlock! You, pal, are the proverbial sight for sore eyes!" Warlock: "Concern! Are selfriend's primary ocular sensors dysfunctional?

Total?” I said when he was close. “Can you talk?” He flopped down on the grass, panting slightly. “Yeah. So?” Jeezum. I mean, mutant weirdos are nothing new to me, you know? But a talking dog? “Why didn’t you mention this before?” I asked him. “It’s not like I lied about it,” said Total, reaching up with a hind leg to scratch behind one ear. “Between you and me, I’m still trying to get used to the whole flying-kid thing.

Now, looking for labels, it is hard to call the Hell's Angels anything but mutants. They are urban outlaws with a rural ethic and a new, improvised style of self-preservation. Their image of themselves derives mainly from Celluloid, from the Western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in. Very few read books, and in most cases their formal education ended at fifteen or sixteen. What little they know of history has come from the mass media, beginning with comics ... so if they see themselves in terms of the past, it's because they can't grasp the terms of the present, much less the future. They are the sons of poor men and drifters, losers and the sons of losers. Their backgrounds are overwhelmingly ordinary. As people, they are like millions of other people. But in their collective identity they have a peculiar fascination so obvious that even the press has recognized it, although not without cynicism. In its ritual flirtation with reality the press has viewed the Angels with a mixture of awe, humor and terror -- justified, as always, by a slavish dedication to the public appetite, which most journalists find so puzzling and contemptible that they have long since abandoned the task of understanding it to a handful of poll-takers and "experts.

About once every million divisions, they produce a mutant. Usually this is bad luck for the mutant—change is always risky for an organism—but just occasionally the new bacterium is endowed with some accidental advantage, such as the ability to elude or shrug off an attack of antibiotics. With this ability to evolve rapidly goes another, even scarier advantage.

Now Van Ness claimed already to have died, more than once, in various other universes. Who can refute that? Is there any proof otherwise? Imagine a slight revision in Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return: not that at history’s end all matter collapses back to the center, Big-Bangs, and starts again identically; but that it starts again with one infinitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule— every time, and an endless number of times. When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. You don’t mark the intervening ages—subjectively you experience nothing other than almost having died. But in fact you’ve edged into another kingdom, ruled by another king, engaging other potentialities. If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman. There’s a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide— and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt. And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time— no, out into the burning ocean of eternity— what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy.

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the great wide nothingness and out of our lives - sure, that would be nice - but so would a new Cadillac - quit dreaming - it just doesn't work that way. . .

As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. It is not communist revolution that is now abolishing the allo-exploited working class - instead, neoliberalism is in the course of doing so. Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.

I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion — that’s good technology. I’m talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western — they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skillfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-A, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.

I was wondering how Ms. Hetley, who seemed to occupy just about every slot on the New York Times hardback, paperback, and e-book bestseller lists, had managed to wring eight five-hundred-page installments out of the concept of wars between rival gangs of vampires and wizards when it seemed obvious to me that all a wizard would have to do to kick a vampire's ass was pounce on it during the day while it was sleeping. How could anyone take this stuff seriously, I wondered. Hetley's graphic depictions of wizard-on-vampire sex, which was creating a bloodthirsty, mutant race of evil, soulless 'vampards', seemed absurd.

To make your habits even more attractive, you can take this strategy one step further. Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group. Steve Kamb, an entrepreneur in New York City, runs a company called Nerd Fitness, which “helps nerds, misfits, and mutants lose weight, get strong, and get healthy.” His clients include video game lovers, movie fanatics, and average Joes who want to get in shape. Many people feel out of place the first time they go to the gym or try to change their diet, but if you are already similar to the other members of the group in some way—say, your mutual love of Star Wars—change becomes more appealing because it feels like something people like you already do.

And yet there are other days, when I’m downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar’s dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: “A Stronger Loving World.” To the only panel he’s circled. Oscar—who never defaced a book in his life—circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt’s plan has succeded in “saving the world.” Veidt says: “I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.” And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: “In

The Case of the Eyeless Fly The fruit fly has a mutant gene which is recessive, i.e., when paired with a normal gene, has no discernible effect (it will be remembered that genes operate in pairs, each gene in the pair being derived from one parent). But if two of these mutant genes are paired in the fertilised egg, the offspring will be an eyeless fly. If now a pure stock of eyeless flies is made to inbreed, then the whole stock will have only the 'eyeless' mutant gene, because no normal gene can enter the stock to bring light into their darkness. Nevertheless, within a few generations, flies appear in the inbred 'eyeless' stock with eyes that are perfectly normal. The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is that the other members of the gene-complex have been 'reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise for the missing normal eye-forming gene.' Now re-shuffling, as every poker player knows, is a randomising process. No biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds of millions of years. Nor does the concept of natural selection provide the slightest help in this case. The re-combination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan which includes the rules of genetic self-repair after certain types of damage by deleterious mutations. But such co-ordinative controls can only operate on levels higher than that of individual genes. Once more we are driven to the conclusion that the genetic code is not an architect's blueprint; that the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, closely knit, self-regulating micro-hierarchy; and that mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels. This micro-hierarchy controls the pre-natal skills of the embryo, which enable it to reach its goal, regardless of the hazards it may encounter during development. But phylogeny is a sequence of ontogenies, and thus we are confronted with the profound question: is the mechanism of phylogeny also endowed with some kind of evolutionary instruction booklet? Is there a strategy of the evolutionary process comparable to the 'strategy of the genes'-to the 'directiveness' of ontogeny (as E.S. Russell has called it)?

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

THAT’S WHAT SF IS ALL ABOUT. IF YOU WISH TO YIELD TO REALITY, GO READ PHILIP ROTH; READ THE NEW YORK LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT MAINSTREAM BESTSELLING WRITERS. . . . THIS IS WHY I LOVE SF. I LOVE TO READ IT; I LOVE TO WRITE IT. THE SF WRITER SEES NOT JUST POSSIBILITIES BUT WILD POSSIBILITIES. IT’S NOT JUST, “WHAT IF—.” IT’S “MY GOD; WHAT IF—.” IN FRENZY AND HYSTERIA. THE MARTIANS ARE ALWAYS COMING.

We hear that we need someone wise to provide guidance and immediately think of Stick, the talking sensei rat from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Total?” I said when he was close. “Can you talk?” He flopped down on the grass, panting slightly. “Yeah. So?” Jeezum. I mean, mutant weirdos are nothing new to me, you know? But a talking dog?

A handicapped person is, by force of circumstance, a potential expert, a mutant in the motor and sensory domain. It is no accident that the social is in creasingly being organized around him: the blind person and the spastic constitute testing grounds, interesting mechanisms which it seems proper to cerebralize, whilst at the same time socializing them for form's sake. They have it in them to become wonderful instruments, precisely because they are immobilized and therefore marked down for automatism and remote control. The normal man will never make such a good automaton as someone who is disabled or spastic. There is nothing new in all this. It was eunuchs who provided the most beautiful voices in the choirs of the Renaissance.

Are you taking an old vaccine for a new mutant of COVID-19, or are you optimizing your body for infection?

Good news. Paisley has designed Milla a new outfit, to better suit the Happy Apples brand she’s working on. It’s a bright green suit, complete with a hat, that makes Milla look like some sort of human-apple mutant. Paisley is rather proud of it, and Happy thinks it’s marvellous. Muck thinks it actually is a giant apple, but we’ll let that go.

let it be—MONEY! Of course it was money. What else could it be? There was so much stuff he needed: a Mutant Max lunchbox, a Rapper Zapper Blaster, and, of course, the new Terminator Gladiator game he kept seeing advertized on TV. Mom and Dad were so mean and horrible, they wouldn’t buy it for him. But he could buy whatever he liked with his own money. So there. Ha ha ha ha ha. Wouldn’t Ralph be green with envy when

Is Monkeypox the new COVID-19?

I have been told by many that their life is wonderful, that life’s a game, but it’s not fair, I break the rules, so I don’t care! That it is thrilling to be part of the freaking world of butt holes. I got news for you; I did want all that. I have been tooled, that dying you see the light too, along with the flashing by of your stupid pathetic life. Yet, at least I had a stupid pathetic life. Just like my great-grandma Nevaeh Natalie, grandmother Jaylynn, and my freaked-up mother Kristen, oh, and also my dad, and mom said- ‘she was born on May 12, 2001.’ She had me later on in life to another freakier she’s even more freaked up than my step-monster, after Brandon my real dad passed from something that I cannot protonate, I don’t want to talk about it- finding out how she left him, for someone else other than him, which she said she would happen or never- ever do. He ended it… Besides, that was it… I am not saying more; I do not want to… I don’t freaking have to. Freak that crap in the butt! Yet sometimes, I feel like such a steep child, yet in a way that is just what I am. However, my daddy loves me anyway, yet my little sis is their biological child. I was adopted before they realized that freaking one another in the old-school hallways would not work for them, anyway, it would not be long until she gets knocked up, with my pain in the butt sister Kellie. When she dropped out. I never really knew my real dad; my dad was always the one that was everything to me. Yet my mom is the monster, and I the mutant, (E-ugh! She said- ‘When she saw me as a baby girl in the nursery.’) However, she felt that way about me since day one, and I feel the same, damn- yes, the same way the same damn way. It was a new day… that fell to me… to me if you think about it; I have always been falling. Honestly, I thought that someday, ‘I would do wonder and crap cucumbers.’ Never truly pondering my last moments on this gray-green dying plant, we call earth. Looking over those visions from my past, my mind seems rather dreadful, nasty, and bleak. Just plan sadly really. Lonely in my memories, I felt that nearly if not all things would have improved if it was just covered up, covered over, and forgotten about completely in sixth grade. A failure to recall if you do well. That would be awesome.

The reality of the COVID-19 pandemic is you are likely getting daily exposures to the virus during peak outbreaks.

Cystic fibrosis was the most common genetic disease in Caucasian populations—about one in twenty-nine Caucasians carried a single copy of the mutant CF gene, or in terms of the US population,

- Espero un mínimo de profesionalidad y un poco de respeto. - Si querías profesionalidad, igual deberías haber elegido otro equipo. - Y lo hice [...] pero vosotros erais los únicos que no teníais otra cosa que hacer.

If those same scientists analyzed babies who are born with congenital heart disorders- who have to undergo open-heart surgery the moment they are born, whose tiny chests are opened and doused with icy water to paralyze their metabolisms, who are kept alive by machines and must have a series of surgeries as they grow-they might conclude those children would have worse outlooks than healthy children. Personally, I believe their lives are neither better nor worse, only different. We, on the mountain, and these children with their surgeries are sort of "abnormal," a kind of "mutant," because we both challenged our destiny and wrote a new ending. It's why I identify with them. When I'm with them, my life has meaning, and my heart grows. They are messengers of life, these children with voices made hoarse by the intubation that will often affect their vocal cords. In their raspy voices, they whisper to me that I was right to continue trudging over that mountain...

If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine. If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid.10 You will not go digging up Danish studies11 proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids.12 If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election. And, if four years later they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible. It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact. You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a fucking parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in fucking “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your fucking pajamas.

Is the weather nice?” “Yeah, we’re in Austin. Got here about an hour ago. It’s probably 80 degrees.” “Wish I could say the same for here.” I sigh. “Get this: it snowed last night. Like real, motherfucking snowflakes.” I’m trying to act pissed, but I can’t bring myself to it because I’m so happy to be talking to Gus right now. I know I don’t have long, so I need to make the most of it. He laughs. “No way?” “Yeah, it’s October. Isn’t snow against the rules or something until at least December?” “You’re asking the wrong dude that question. Is it cold?” “Yeah, I had to buy a winter coat today. Though for the locals this is probably still T-shirt weather. I swear Minnesotans have some sort of mutant gene that makes them immune to hot and cold. It’s freaky.” He laughs again but then turns serious. “What about boots? Did you buy some boots? You’ll need boots.” It’s funny when he acts parental. I over-exaggerate a full body shiver. “Stop. Buying the coat was bad enough. I don’t want to give in to the snow boots yet. I need time to work up to that. Maybe next month, or the one after that.” The truth is, I’ll need to buy the boots new, because used shoes skeeve me out, and I need to save up for them. That will take a while. “You’re right, you’d better pace yourself.” He’s teasing me. I tease him right back. “Need I remind you that you’re touring the United States this winter? That includes the northern frigid states. You’re going to need to buy a winter coat too, you know.” He exhales through gritted teeth. “I know. I’m still in cold-weather denial.” “It’s a nice place to visit, denial, but you can’t live there forever, dude.” Maybe I should take my own advice. “Bright Side, are you quoting Confucius or JFK? That sounds so familiar.” I know without seeing him that he’s wearing this dumb, mocking expression that makes me laughevery time. “Dude, I think it was Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back. It was part of Luke’s Jedi training or something.

With all those mutants out there, who would chance going beyond the Perimeter after dark?” — Jimbo

Listen, Sam, and everyone, you need to know something so it won’t freak you out: Pack Leader can speak. I mean, human words. Like Smart-Girl Barbie there was saying, he’s some kind of mutant or whatever. I know you think I’m probably crazy.” She had Hermit Jim’s tin cup now and used it to scoop up another helping of wonderful, wonderful pudding. Blondie—Astrid—was opening a can of fruit cocktail. “What do you know about the FAYZ?” Astrid asked. Lana stopped eating and stared at her. “The what?” Astrid shrugged and looked embarrassed. “That’s what people are calling it. The Fallout Alley Youth Zone. FAYZ.” “What does that mean?” “Have you seen the barrier?” She nodded. “Oh, yeah. I’ve seen the barrier. I touched the barrier, which, by the way, is not a good idea.” Sam said, “As far as we can tell, it goes clear around in a big circle. Or maybe a sphere. We think the center is the power plant. It seems like a ten-mile radius from there, you know, twenty miles across.” “Circumference of 62.83 miles, with an area of 314.159 square miles,” Astrid said. “Point 159,” Quinn echoed from his corner. “That’s important.” “It’s basically pi,” Astrid said. “You know, 3.14159265…. Okay, I’ll stop.” Lana hadn’t stopped being hungry. She took a scoop of the fruit cocktail. “Sam, you think the power plant caused it?” Sam shrugged, and then he hesitated, surprised. Lana guessed that he felt no pain in his shoulder. “No one knows. All of a sudden every single person over the age of fourteen disappears and there’s this barrier and people…animals…” Lana slowly absorbed this new information. “You mean all the adults? They’re gone?” “Poof,” Quinn said. “They ditched. They blinked out. They vacated. They took the off-ramp. They cut a hole. They emigrated. Adults and teenagers. Nothing left but kids.” “I’ve done all I can to strengthen the door,” Edilio announced. “But all I have is nails. Someone can break it in eventually.” “Maybe they didn’t all ditch,” Lana said. “Maybe we did.” Astrid said, “That’s definitely one of the possibilities, not that it makes any real difference. It’s effectively the same thing.

One of the greatest weaknesses of Chris Mitchell’s editorship of the Australian is that he has allowed Greg Sheridan to remain his foreign editor throughout. Sheridan is a man who argued in different columns that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of our era; that unlike mediocre politicians like Barack Obama and John McCain, the “new star” of American politics, Sarah Palin, was able to combine “celebrity” with “character”; that President Obama’s “anti-Israel hysteria” was leading his administration toward “licensing a mutant strain of anti-semitism”; and that the United States would most likely be strengthened by the crash of Wall Street in September 2008.

Pynchon has been a favorite writer and a major influence all along. In many ways I see him as almost the start of a certain mutant pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect that if you talk with a lot of recent SF writers you'll find they've all read Gravity's Rainbow (1973) several times and have been very much influenced by it. I was into Pynchon early on- I remember seeing a New York Times review of V. when it first came out- I was just a kid- and thinking, Boy, that sounds like some really weird shit!

A sister who could barely remember her brother's face. True love of a boy she had barely kissed. Mortal enemy of a childhood friend. Best friend of a mutant. Symbol of a rebellion.

If you could learn entire languages in a week, draw perfect pictures without thinking about it, and make complex calculations in your head in seconds, would you be willing to trade that for the ability to comfortably walk into a coffee shop and shake a stranger’s hand? My thoughts went racing to modern comic mythology such as X-Men: The Last Stand, in which mutants are presented with a drug that could make them normal by robbing them of their powers. Would purine treatment in autistic savants be the same sort of thing? I had to know, so I asked Dr. Naviaux, “Will savants lose their mutant powers if we cure them? “Treating an autistic savant with a purine inhibitor should not change his or her extraordinary abilities at all,” he said. The hyperconnected islands of neurons that were formed when an autism patient was young would still be there. The powers that the islands grant would still be available, but they would no longer be the only neural connections available. “In younger patients in particular, new connections, longer ones, stand a good chance of forming once the danger response is shut down by a purine blocker,” says Dr. Naviaux. The result? A superhuman mind without the burden of autism. Wow.

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance. The viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of disease and death, now begin to look more like mobile genes. Evolution is still an infinitely long and tedious biologic game, with only the winners staying at the table, but the rules are beginning to look more flexible. We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party. They may be a mechanism for keeping new, mutant kinds of DNA in the widest circulation among us.

Insect infestation? A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a “mycopesticide”—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that, after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them, but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in its environment and then bursting a mushroom from the top of its head that releases its spores to the wind.

At recess, my friends and I talk about eating our first pepperoni pizza like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, eating lasagna like Garfield, eating McDonald’s, watching the new Star Wars inside a theater with air-conditioning, eating “popcorn” with butter. I’ve never tried any of these things except for pizza from Pizza Hut, and that was last Christmas. “¿But